Rederederederedesign

The curse of the Internet is that it is too damn easy to redesign, reformat and restructure content. (This also can be a blessing, but that's not this post.)

Today's revamped Times-Dispatch website takes us several steps back to the old www.timesdispatch.com moniker (a good step) and one horrendous step backwards in terms of design and functionality. The handful of reader comments gathered under news of the site redesign sum it up pretty well:

• It is very difficult to use and I cannot find articles.  The old site design was much easier to use and better organized.  It is also extremely cluttered with advertising and obnoxiously loud audio on ads.
• the site takes forever to load because of the excessive amount of banners, video and images.
• Sorry guys - you missed the mark on the “improvements” - it’s cluttered, chopped up and not very friendly to use.
• Please go back to your old design, have a new site with the new look available and work with your customers feedback to fine tune it before you drive away all of your customers with such a poorly executed redesign.
• It’s ugly, and it’s hardly simpler and easier to use.
• Visually and functionally atrocious.

It makes me think of the good old days of newspaper design. There was an expert in the design business working at VCU back in the late 1980s, Ed Arnold, who I believe worked on the initial design of USAToday. He talked about how a newspaper design should last decades, which meant that every minor detail should be agonized over before it is committed to ink. I'm not sure that's the case with online newspaper design.

I'm no expert on web design, but I imagine at least three rules should govern a newspaper's online presence -- are the pages visually appealing; is it easy to find content; do the ads complement the site design? The latest redesign bats 0 for 3 here.